While SF is considered the popular area of the Bay Area, many of us residents live in the South Bay. One of the most exciting foodie streets in the South Bay is Castro Street. Located in the heart of Mountain View, Castro Street can transform from a Saturday casual brunch spot filled with used bookstores and afternoon Dim Sum to a South Bay hip area for nighttime foodies. This past weekend, I scored a reservation at Scratch. The...

Pop-up restaurants are all over San Francisco. A pop-up is a temporary restaurant which borrows space (and often a kitchen) from an established business. Located anywhere from diners to bars, you can find a new type of food in locations you might not expect. A pop-up that stands out from the rest is Rice Paper Scissors which serves Vietnamese food on Thursday nights out of Mojo Bicycle Cafe on Divisadero. Mojo Cafe itself is...

Impossibly, it feels like summer in San Francisco now that the fog has disappeared for a short few weeks. Suddenly, everyone is wearing sandals, skirts, shorts and jorts. Little do most tourists know, but summer weather here in the Bay Area is really either from late April to early June or from late August to early October. Tourists who come to SF in July, inevitably end up buying overpriced fleece jackets with the Golden Gate Bridge...

San Francisco is not a sandwich town. Yes, we have Ike’s, but one famous sandwich store does not make for an entire lunch culture. I’d venture to say that your average sandwich in San Francisco is just that, average. As someone who likes sandwiches and springs for one at least two or three times a week for lunch, San Francisco has not lived up to my expectations. However, I do have a few places where I like to go for sandwiches. One...

As a kid, I spent my Saturdays at a children’s ceramics studio in Berkeley. I started working with clay and on the potter’s wheel when I was five years old and continued through high school and college. A few of the many ceramic pieces I created included a life-size character from The Hobbit, a sculpture of a fish glazed in the ancient Japanese Raku style, as well as many bowls and vases. I went to “clay class” weekly during the...

One rainy afternoon in San Francisco, I walked from the Mission to Hayes Valley in search of lunch. Hayes Valley has a good assortment of restaurants, cafes, and to-go spots all within a few blocks of each other, varying from a neighborhood Italian restaurant, to a wine store-come-cafe, to a bread pudding shop set up in the style of an ice cream store—complete with 108 different flavors of bread pudding! The rain that day was heavy...